Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Warner

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Warner

The book] I'll be pressing into people's hands forever is Lolly Willowes, the 1926 novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It tells the story of a woman who rejects the life that society has fixed for her in favor of freedom and the most unexpected of alliances. It completely blindsided me: Starting as a straightforward, albeit beautifully written family saga, it tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness. - Helen Macdonald in The New York Times Book Review's By the Book.

In Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster's struggle to break way from her controlling family--a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange. Warner is one of the outstanding and indispensable mavericks of twentieth-century literature, a writer to set beside Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, with a subversive genius that anticipates the fantastic flights of such contemporaries as Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson.

SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER (1893-1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a member of the Communist Party. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (available from New York Review Books), appeared in 1926 and was the first ever Book of- the-Month Club selection. Mr. Fortune's Maggot, her second, followed a year later. The Salutation was the title novella of a 1932 collection. According to Warner's biographer Claire Harman, it was almost certainly begun in the expectation that it would grow into a full-length novel, a sequel, or an extended coda to Mr. Fortune's Maggot. Yet it also stands on its own, and Warner considered it the purest, the least time-serving story I ever wrote. Over the course of her long career, Sylvia Townsend Warner published five more novels, seven books of poetry, a translation of Proust, fourteen volumes of short stories, and a biography of T. H. White. NYRB also publishes Summer Will Show, Warner's novel of the French Revolution of 1848.

ADAM MARS-JONES was born in London, where he lives and works. His fiction includes Monopolies of Love (1992) and The Waters of Thirst (1993). He writes about films and books for London newspapers.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780486843483
ISBN 10	0486843483
Title	Lolly Willowes
Author	Sylvia Warner
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Dover Publications Inc.
Year published	2020-03-18
Number of pages	160
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.